Range Lidar Visualization

MultiMediaTechnology, 2011

Über Range Lidar Visualization

Range Lidar Visualization is a visualization for the data created by a Velodyne Range Lidar. The program was developed during the first semester of MultiMediaTechnology.
"What is a Velodyne Range Lidar?" you might ask right now. Well, it is a device that is able to scan it's surroundings by utilizing an array of lasers (64 to be exact) to obtain time of flight distance information which can then be plotted, generating a point cloud representing a 360° view of the surrounding area. It also ...

Range Lidar Visualization is a visualization for the data created by a Velodyne Range Lidar. The program was developed during the first semester of MultiMediaTechnology.

"What is a Velodyne Range Lidar?" you might ask right now. Well, it is a device that is able to scan it's surroundings by utilizing an array of lasers (64 to be exact) to obtain time of flight distance information which can then be plotted, generating a point cloud representing a 360° view of the surrounding area. It also offers information about the intensity of each returning laser which allows to distinguish between objects by the reflectivity of their materials.

We simply used the data provided by this very cleverly engineered device and placed vertices accordingly. We also adjusted the individual color of each vertex proportionally to it's intensity. As you can tell from the images and video below this produces some impressive results. You can clearly tell the device was mounted on a moving vehicle and you even can identify the actual railroad tracks it's on. The program uses threads and can divide it's tasks to multiple cores if available.

We added first person flight controls to be able to move around in this virtual environment. You can pan and tilt the camera and move around as you please.

This project was developed using C++ in combination with the open source scene graph engine Panda3D.